Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman Loris Cro on the Rise of Zig
Dec 25, 2025
Loris Cro, VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, shares his journey from bioinformatics to the world of Zig, a rising star in systems programming. They delve into Zig's fresh approach to simplicity and explicitness, contrasting it with the complexities of C/C++. Loris discusses Zig's memory safety, cross-compilation advantages, and innovative comptime capabilities. He highlights case studies like Bun and TigerBeetle, showcasing Zig's real-world impact and its mission to make systems programming more accessible. A conversation about the future of development awaits!
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From Bioinformatics To Zig Community
- Loris Cro discovered Zig while teaching Redis modules and switched from bioinformatics to systems programming.
- He joined the Zig Software Foundation after engaging with the community and contributing actively.
Breaking Changes As A Feature
- Zig remains pre-1.0 and intentionally breaks compatibility to evolve quickly.
- This breaking ability is treated as a design advantage for rapid iteration and improvements.
Header Include Order Bit The Bindings
- Loris recounts debugging OpenCV C++ bindings that failed due to a header included inside an extern C block.
- The issue only surfaced in Zig because the Go build had accidentally masked the mistake via include order.